WISE, knowledge sharing as a purpose creation tool

Elena Sanjuan
Nov 2 · 5 min read

Wise is an intergenerational knowledge sharing platform that enables senior professionals in retirement to share their knowledge and experience with emerging businesses.

Intro

65 is the average retirement age in developed countries. Decades ago, when jobs were more physically demanding, people were “old” at this age. However, current an average knowledge worker this days reaches that age in extraordinary physical and mental conditions.

Not surprisingly, 53% of Americans who expect to continue working after 65, will do it by choice, and for 58% of them the main reason is “I enjoy my job/career and would like to continue”. (Northwestern Mutual’s 2019 Planning & Progress Study).

In this context, we asked ourselves How Might We…

  1. help retirees share their knowledge?
  2. get society to value the knowledge of senior citizens?

Research.

We focused on obtaining information that would help us understand drivers and motivations for people in retirement or who will be retiring in the next 5 years.

We created a survey using a Lean Survey Canvas, and carried out a series of interviews. Our main findings were:

  1. Against our initial assumptions, they were not so interested in mentoring entrepreneurs (only 37%)
  2. Those who have been in retirement for a longer period are more interested in receiving knowledge rather than sharing theirs because they tend to feel disconnected from the business world and feel their skills are not up-to-date
  3. When asked about the activities they would be interested in doing in when they retire, the preferred options are those that do not demand a continuous engagement

An interesting quote coming from one of the participants was:

Today this is in most cases a very binary process. Day n, you’re still running 10+ hours a day, and day n+1 this becomes suddenly 0.

Like with prisoners that get a probation before they are released — to adapt to the open world, a retirement probation would be a nice thing as well.

We decided our goal would be to provide the tools so those who wanted to have this “probation” as a transition into retirement, could find the way to create it for themselves and adapted to their interests.

Definition.

In order to better frame the problem, we created two user personas.

One would represent our main user, retirees. Maria, a 63 year old highly skilled professional, who retired a year ago and seeks for something that makes her feel purposeful. She would like to continue contributing to society and doesn’t find a way to do so.

The other one, Dani is a young entrepreneur. He has a strong knowledge in fields related with his business, but he struggles to make strategical decisions as his business grows.

User pe

We analysed the user journey for both, and found their main pain points. This way, we were able to define key functionalities for our knowledge sharing platform.

In Maria’s case, these would be:

  • To be able to decide the challenges in which she would be keen on participating
  • To be able to define her implication
  • To obtain relevant feedback that could be motivational for her, and to be able to share it to showcase her activity

In Dani’s case, these would be:

  • To ensure professional information from advisors is verified
  • To be able to have test sessions to verify if this option is adequate for his company before paying for the services
  • To be able to select the advisor and the collaboration formula depending on the challenge

Solution.

Based on this, we defined the solution following a process very similar to Tinder app’s one:

However, in order to be able to monetize the platform, we defined a double validation on the companie’s side. They would have the opportunity to validate a match, and be charged once they validate it. Until the match is validated, they will be able to access the professional profile of the advisors but not their contact information, which will only be available for them once the match is validated.

We designed the solution creating a desktop prototype for the user flows for senior users since according to our survey desktop and tablets are their preferred formats. However, for entrepreneurs user flows we designed a mobile prototype.

In this first video you can see the desktop on boarding process. We focused on explaining the steps to make sure the user is aware of the process. We also established a standardized way to gather information about skills and fields of knowledge to make it easier to create “matches”.

Desktop on boarding

Once a “match” takes place, the company has the opportunity to validate the advisor. Once validated, contact information becomes visible, and users can start a conversation to agree on the format of their collaboration.

You can see how it would work in the following video

Match validation

Once the collaboration is completed, the company can rate the advisor and provide feedback in a simple and easy way.

Feedback

Finally, the advisor would receive that feedback and have the opportunity to showcase it in her Linkedin profile.

Conclusions.

Research into this field made us only start to understand the potential of designing for this user group. The approach to design for older adults has traditionally been very conservative and assumed they were not specially tech savvy. However, people who are reaching retirement today, have worked with computers and digital tools for the last 20 years, and are demanding a new approach. We believe there is a huge opportunity in creating digital products that can engage this audience and help them remain active, motivated and purposeful.

Within WISE, we envision the possibility of introducing new features and services such as

  • Creating a network of experts for the different knowledge fields based on ratings and feedback
  • Run events, panels or themed meetings on specific subjects or knowledge fields
  • Develop short courses or workshops

If you liked this case study, please give it a 👏. Thanks for reading!

This project was part of Ironhack’s UX/UI bootcamp 2019.

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